I first got and played this game at some point in high school, when it first came out. At the time, I spent about 12 hours on it and my impression of it was overwhelmingly negative. My dude couldn't kill a fly (not for lack of trying), the combat was completely uncontrollable, and I found myself being unable to keep focus on the central plot because of the absolute insane amount of sidequests (if I remember correctly, I spent 10 hours in the first big city alone). That being said, I bought it on a whim here to give it a second chance. I don't know if it's cause I'm older and have more patience decomposing the character creation or if I'm able to focus better on the main plot while doing the side quests or if the various patches radically improved the playing experience, but I almost literally haven't stopped playing this game since GoG released it. I wake up, play Arcanum, go to bed, and repeat the process. It's been like that for a week now with a two-day break for a road trip. It's killing me! The game holds you in that well. The combat is still a problem, though I'm pretty sure I didn't know about the turn-based option (real-time is default) when I played it high school. Playing it turn-based makes it a lot more bearable, almost (but definitely not) to the point of being okay. What keeps it firmly in the realm of bad combat systems is that you can't control your party members *at all*. What this means is that combat will be one of two scenarios: either you're fighting easy dudes and your party will mop up or you're fighting moderate dudes who will gang up and kill your guys while you're helpless to advise with tactics or anything. Forget about chilling on the other side of a choke point and shooting spells or projectiles at the enemies to force them to charge through the gauntlet. What's going to happen is your entire party rushing through, getting surrounded, and slaughtered. And don't even try to think about retreat. Once you're in battle, it's to the death. Even if you try to run, your party's not gonna have anything to do with that. I think the best thing to do with this combat system is to have a party composed completely of tanks who can take the damage that you're going to get whether you plan otherwise or not. The balance is a lot better than I remembered it. I always play thieves and, in a true rarity for RPGs, was finally able to create a viable, successful thief character. Right now I have a techie (gunslinger) thief, which is working out great, and some time down the road I might do a playthrough with a mage-thief maybe. Or maybe some sort of super-evil dude for a change, or maybe a Gnomish mechanic, or maybe.... Despite the combat system, this game gets 5 stars from me. The rest of it is that good. The sheer amount of quests and ethical choices, the awesome plot, and the insanely customizable characters make playing this game an absolute necessity. Even with its flaws, I'd probably buy it at $50 today. At $6, it's almost criminally inexpensive!
The problem with most strategy games is that they essentially boil down to massing the biggest amount of units. Even hallowed TBS titles like Heroes 3, for example, suffer a bit from this. Other titles, specifically most RTSes, are thinly designed abstractions of "build, build, build". Lords of the Realm 2, though, avoids this pitfall almost completely. The RTS battle portion, with it's insanely strategy-demanding maps and it's beautifully balanced yet simple units, puts more stress on the skill of the general (you) than on the size of the army. Over the last week since I rebought this on GoG, I've fought battles utilizing an amazing array of military strategy and terrain utilization to win seemingly impossible battles against armies with superior numbers. On the TBS side, the depth is equally impressive. Resource management, juggling raising and feeding armies with pleasing and feeding your people, is a very tricky process with the capacity to collapse with alarming speed. Having to make the difficult decision to pull your limited amount of peasants off of making weapons so that they can harvest grain for the next year and avoid starvation is quite difficult when a 500-man enemy army is marching in on your much-smaller force. Of course, there's still hope for winning the battle through superior strategy, but if you have to bail, you can cut-and-run and leave your enemy with a devastated county to conquer. In my last game, the fighting got so bitter that my enemy and I completely destroyed the resources within a wide swath of land. The result was, since armies need to eat (which is an optional setting, but more fun to play with than without) and there was no food for such a long stretch, that any army trying to march across the devastation to fight the enemy would starve to death before arriving at their destination. The solution was to send supply carts ahead of the armies to the counties if you wanted to attack, and if you didn't want to be attacked, to try to intercept and destroy the enemy's supply carts before they reached the county to feed the troops. Such a strategy required many small armies (because risking losing a large army to starvation is insanity) to defend and attack these carts, the resources in which were extremely valuable to begin with and were devastating to lose. Instead, a war was fought along another path across another county, unintentionally devastating a Lord that happened to be in the way. My point is that this game can take some pretty unexpected, very strategically demanding paths that you wouldn't ordinarily run into in other games. Heroes, Starcraft, and even Myth (although it beats LoTR on the battle strategy front, I'd say) don't have these potential situations. The game does have a few minor negatives. For example, selected groups of units in battle will try to form themselves into formation. This is ok for moving them places but the fatal flaw of the setup is that when you select them and before doing anything else, the selected group will move into formation immediately. In addition, the units around them will move out of the way to accommodate them. This can result in very carefully positioned troops moving themselves into range of enemy fire and other unfortunate occurrences like this and is insanely frustrating. There might be some advanced combat controls somewhere for changing this behavior, but all I can find in the manual is hotkeys for making the troops assume horizontal or vertical formations (H and V keys). I haven't played with this yet, but it might alleviate some of the pain. Outside of battle, diplomacy with the AI could be improved slightly. Alliances are mostly useless, as I have yet to to have an ally help me out in any way. The only thing my allies do is betray me at the worst possible moment. However, I haven't played the campaign (just been playing custom maps), so there might be some scripting there to improve this. Finally, in LAN games (which don't seem to work on the one Vista box I've tried, but work just fine in XP), all info boxes seem to vanish very quickly without giving you a chance to read them. This might be a problem with my setup, but it might also be something designed to make people not drag on their turns or something... For experienced players, this isn't too bad, but it's extremely annoying at first. Other than that, the game's pretty much perfect. The flaws are present just like in anything else, but everything except those three complaints is practically perfect. For $5.99, it's criminal not to give this game a try.
